It’s hard to write about the Russian Presidential election, not because
it is particularly difficult to understand but because the normal
language of such things can’t describe it. There are candidates, but
their names can appear on the ballot only if the Kremlin allows it.
There is a campaign, but candidates are allowed to appear on television
only if the Kremlin O.K.s it. There are, usually, debates, but Vladimir
Putin, who has been in power in Russia for eighteen years and is running
for another six-year term, doesn’t deign to take part in them. There are
opinion polls, but their results are adjusted to fit the probable result
of the vote. And then there is the vote, but its outcome is preordained.
In other words, the event scheduled for March 18, 2018, is not an
election, but it is called one.

Russians face the choice between “voting” in the “election” and
boycotting it. The decision is harder than it may seem. The boycott
argument is clear: taking part in an obvious travesty serves only to
legitimize its architects. Proponents of participation, on the other
hand, argue that an election, even a sham one, puts stress on the
regime, thereby creating a chance for change. The Kremlin goes to great
lengths to ensure that the spectacle is empty—why make their job easier?
Put more simply, every person who boycotts the election increases the
number of percentage points by which Putin stands to win; this argument
is suspect, however, since the relationship between official election
results and actual votes cast is uncertain.

All the same arguments have been made before. It’s not the first or even
the second or third time that Russia is holding a sham election. Six
long years ago, when Putin last had himself “elected,” two of his most
prominent opponents—the chess champion turned politician Garry Kasparov
and the longtime politician Boris Nemtsov—called for a boycott. But the
anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny opposed this call. “There is no
mobilizing message in the call to a boycott,” he argued. “It just says,
‘Stay home, watch TV, be outraged.’ But we spend all day watching TV and
being outraged as it is.” Nor, he argued, would a boycott succeed in
significantly lowering voter turnout.

In December, 2011, following a blatantly rigged parliamentary election,
Russians suddenly took to the streets to protest. It seemed that the
whole country was swept up in the demonstrations: people protested all
over the country, and famous writers, musicians, and actors joined in.
Even a television host named Ksenia Sobchak, a young woman known to have
close ties to the Putin family (her father was Putin’s first boss in
politics), joined the fight. Navalny, Nemtsov, and Kasparov emerged as
the most visible organizers of the protests. Then, in March, 2012, Putin
claimed victory, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, and moved
quickly to crack down on his opponents. In 2013, Kasparov was forced to
emigrate. Nemtsov was killed in 2015. Navalny has been repeatedly
dragged into court on charges of fraud and
embezzlement.
In the summer of 2013, he was sentenced to a five-year prison term,
which was changed to a suspended sentence when thousands of people again
took to the streets, risking arrest. At the end of 2014, Navalny was
sentenced to house arrest, and his brother was imprisoned—in effect,
taken hostage.

Navalny has appealed all of his convictions to the European Court on
Human Rights, where he has won every time. Most recently, the European
court labelled Navalny’s 2014 conviction and sentence
“arbitrary”.
But the Russian Ministry of Justice is considering an appeal, so, for
now, Navalny remains a convicted felon in Russia and his brother remains
behind bars. In spite of unrelenting attacks—in addition to being
brought up on charges, Navalny has been assaulted physically—he has
built his anti-corruption blog into a large, professionally staffed
investigative organization that continues to expose corruption among
Russian officials and to publicize the findings through its
phenomenally popular YouTube
channel. This
year, Navalny has also twice called for large-scale protests, which have
brought more Russians out into the streets in more cities than ever
before. Still, these protests are not exactly political action: each one
of the participants comes out heeding Navalny’s call, but all of them
are not acting together—and, when the protests are over, they go home to
watch TV and be outraged. This year, Navalny has tried to register as a
candidate for President. If he were allowed to campaign, he would
finally be able to gather his supporters into a political organization.

It would have taken a pathological kind of optimism to entertain the
possibility that the Kremlin would allow Navalny to be registered as a
candidate—to campaign and to have his name appear on the ballot in
March. Russian law bans convicted felons from running for office, so the
formal legal groundwork for rejecting Navalny’s application had been
laid (notwithstanding the E.C.H.R. decision). But, even before Navalny
tried to register as a candidate, things got complicated. Sobchak, the
television host, declared her own candidacy. Her candidacy appeared to
have the Kremlin stamp of approval: one of the hallmarks of an
“election” is the presence of a candidate apparently oppositional enough
to lend the spectacle a sort of legitimacy but tame enough not to be a
threat. Six years ago, this role was played by the billionaire Mikhail
Prokhorov, who told me at the time that he had been directly asked by a
Kremlin operative to enter politics. (Prokhorov now lives in New York.)
Unlike Navalny, Sobchak was given airtime on government-controlled
television. But she sounded nothing like a token candidate: she spoke up
against the Russian occupation of Crimea and in favor of L.G.B.T.
rights. She positioned herself explicitly as a protest candidate, asking
everyone who opposes Putin to vote for her; she dubbed her own candidacy
“none of the above.”

In a convoluted and striking stunt, Sobchak attended Putin’s giant
annual press conference, on December 14th, where she was allowed to ask
a question. “I have a question about competition during this election,”
she said, and proceeded to voice a question that Navalny had publicly
asked her to pose. She mentioned the trumped-up charges against Navalny,
and she noted that even she had had difficulty campaigning, because
people were too frightened to rent space to her or distribute her
campaign literature. “People understand that to be in the opposition in
Russia means that you will either be killed or imprisoned, or something
else of the sort will happen to you. My question is: Why does this
happen? Are the authorities frightened of honest competition?”

Putin gave a rambling, partly incoherent answer, in which, without
naming Navalny, he accused him of wanting to “destabilize” Russia. “This
cannot be allowed!” he said, to applause from his handpicked audience of
several hundred.

On Monday, Navalny’s application went before the Central Election
Commission. The video of the proceeding, posted by Navalny’s
organization, is painful to watch: it is the battle of man against
bureaucracy, the sort that Hannah Arendt described as the “rule by
Nobody.” Navalny laid out the case for registering him as a candidate,
noting that his convictions had been deemed invalid by the E.C.H.R. and
calling on the election officials to exercise their right to act
independently in accordance with the law. In response, the commission
chairwoman claimed to be helpless to register Navalny, and proceeded to
accuse him of raising money under false pretenses and of “making idiots
out of young people.” Hard as he tried, Navalny could not get the
officials to engage with the substance of his argument. The commission
voted unanimously to deny him registration.

As soon as the commission meeting was over, Navalny posted a prerecorded
video calling on Russians to boycott the “election.” Sobchak responded
by quoting him back to himself, repeating his six-year-old statement on
the futility of staying home and raging at the television. “Elections
remain the only way to change anything,” she wrote. Of course, she is
assuming that there is, in fact, a way to change something in Russia.